Diego Rivera

"Only the work of art itself 

can raise the standard of taste."

— Diego Rivera

Mexican Artist / Muralist

1886 - 1957

The Flower Carrier

People talk of taste as if it was real.  It is an illusion of judgement.  Every work of art, every poem, and every story has value.  When people begin to label art as good or bad, they are creating false categories that are based on artificial judgements.  What the majority label as good today may be considered bad tomorrow.  You may like something or not like something which in itself is okay.  Liking or disliking reveals something about you.  There is nothing inherently bad or good within the work of art itself.  The sense of good or bad is in the eyes of the beholder. Any judgement made about a work of art is actually a judgement of the person who made the statement.

While there may only be one person today who likes your art, it does not make the art bad. Two hundred years from now the majority of people may consider it a masterpiece.  Taste is fickle and useless.

Diego Rivera, the great Mexican Muralist,  painted a number of murals in the United States during the 1930's.  Edsel Ford hired him to paint a mural at the Detroit Institute of Arts which is still on view today.  John Rockefeller commissioned him to paint a mural in New York.  Since Rivera was a communist, he included a portrait of Lenin in the mural.  When Rockefeller demanded that he remove the portrait from the mural, Rivera refused.  Rockefeller had the mural destroyed.  In the 1930's, a portrait of Lenin was unacceptable to the American public taste.  A work of art was destroyed because the subject matter was unacceptable.  Three hundred years from now, most people probably will never had heard of Lenin and nobody will be offended.  Remember public taste is fickle and arbitrary.

Chinua Achebe

"Art is man's constant effort to create for himself a different order of reality from that which is given to him."

— Chinua Achebe

Nigerian Novelist/Poet

1930 - 2013

Commentary

Through our painting and writing we have an opportunity to recreate the world as we want it to be.  We have the ability and the opportunity to alter reality.  The world into which we are born can be changed.  We can change our story by retelling it in new ways.  Have you changed your story?  Have you altered the reality in which you live?  Or are you caught up in facts as reality?  The more you can alter and change reality, the better artist you will become.

Biography

Chinua Achebe was born Albert Chinualumogu Achebe in the Igbo village of Ogidi in southeastern Nigeria.  Chinualumogu means "May God fight on my behalf."  His parents, Isaiah Okafo Achebe and Janet Anaenechi Iloegbunam Achebe stood at the crossroads of traditional Igbo culture and Christian culture.  His father and mother converted to Protestantism.  

Achebe's mother and sister told him many stories as a child which is a Igbo tradition.  He entered St. Philip's Central school when he was six.  He also attended Sunday school every week.  When he was twelve he moved away from his family and his village to attend the Central school where his older brother taught.  At fourteen, he entered secondary school and completed it in four years instead of the normal five.

In 1948, Achebe entered Nigeria's first university and studied English, history and theology. After his college studies, Achebe found work writing scripts for oral delivery at the Nigerian Broadcasting Service, a radio network, in the city of Lagos.  

Achebe's first and most famous novel, Things Fall Apart, was published in 1958. The novel has sold over 8 million copies and has been translated into 50 languages.

Video

Here is a video of Chinua Achebe discussing Africa after 50 years after writing and publishing Things Fall Apart.

George D. Green

"If you make pictures you are bound to be an abstract painter on some level."

— George D. Green

American Artist

1943 - 

Commentary

People are often divided between those who love abstract art and those who love realistic art.  Just like readers have different tastes in literature.  A few love poetry.  Most hate it.  Some love romance novels and a few look down their noses at people who read romance novels.  Yet all literature is made up of words.  And the same is true of art.  At its core, all art is abstract.  The artist must create the illusion of realism, because a painted tree is never equal to a real tree in the backyard.  Writers, when they tell their stories, are creating illusions of reality.  The fictional world they create is never real no matter how much they base it on the world they live.  Narrative non-fiction may blend the worlds of fact and fiction, but if the writer strays to far from the fact he is considered a liar and may have his books removed from the bookstores.  Yet all writers at some level write fiction.  The world we write about is not the real world.  Even when I write a story about my mother, the character is not my mother.  She is my fantasy of my mother.  At some level all forms of art — painting, music, literature — are not real.

Creative Practice

This week paint that tree in your backyard as an abstract picture of your mother.  Or write a story-poem in the first person voice of your mother describing the tree in your backyard to her mother.

Bones, 1982

Artist Background

George D. Green was born in 1943 in Portland, Oregon.  He received a B.S. degree from the University of Oregon and a M.F.A. from Washington State University.  He had his first solo exhibit in 1968.

Chinua Achebe

"Art is man's constant effort to create for himself a different order of reality from that which is given to him."

— Chinua Achebe

Nigerian Novelist/Poet

1930 -

Through our painting and writing we have an opportunity to recreate the world as we want it to be.  We have the ability and the opportunity to alter reality.  The world into which we are born can be changed.  We can change our story by retelling it in new ways.  Have you changed your story?  Have you altered the reality in which you live?  Or are you caught up in facts as reality?  The more you can alter and change reality, the better artist you will become.

David Hockney

"No matter what the illusion created, it is a flat canvas and it has to be organized in shape."

— David Hockney

English Painter

1937 - 

All art is illusionary.  Whether we are talking about a painting, a novel or a film, we are talking about the art of creating reality out of nothing.  For the painter, the canvas is blank.  For the writer, the page is blank.  For the actor, the character is blank.  Out of nothing the artist creates the illusion of reality.  The better the illusion, the more likely we are to believe that we are experiencing reality.  Creative leaders are masters of illusion, magicians of mystery.

Robert Mapplethorpe

Self-Portrait
(1980)

"My work is about seeing — seeing things like they haven't been seen before."

— Robert Mapplethorpe

American Photographer

1946 - 1989

One of main functions of any art form is to help people see something they had not seen before — to open their eyes to new ways of viewing the world.  Does your creative work shed new light on the way we view the world?  Does it help us see beyond our small private worlds and help us grasp a greater meaning about life?

Part of our role as creative leaders is to show people that there are multiple ways of viewing the world in which we live.  There is not just one reality but multiple realities.  Great art changes people in multiple ways.  Our hearts and minds open and begin to see in ways we have never seen.

Sharon Olds

"Poems come from ordinary experiences and objects, I think.  Out of memory — a dress I lent my daughter on her way back to college; a newspaper photograph of war; a breast self-exam; the tooth fairy; Calvinist parents who beat up their children; a gesture of love; seeing oneself naked over age 50 in a set of bright hotel bathroom mirrors."

— Sharon Olds

American Poet

1942 -

From where does your art come?  As Sharon Olds says, it often comes from the ordinary experiences and objects in our lives.  Poets often find the smallest moments from which to form their poems.  It may be a simple conversation between two people, or a flower laying on a gravestone, or meeting an old friend at the supermarket.  The common place and the everyday is what forms the basis of art.


Where does your art come from?  Is it rooted in reality?  The everyday?  Do you take the smallest of moments and build on them?  Painters capture moments in time?  A brief look at reality?  What holds your attention?  Not everyone paints the same subjects.  We choose different subjects.  Some people paint fields and others paint people.  What fascinates you about the world in which you live?  What demands that you paint it again and again?


Here is a poem by Sharon Olds.  


Grandmother Love Poem
by Sharon Olds


Late in her life, when we fell in love,
I'd take her out from the nursing home
for a chaser and two bourbons.  She'd crack
a joke sharp as a tin lid
hot from the teeth of the can-opener,
and cackle her crack-corn laugh.  Next to her
wit, she prided herself on her hair,
snowy and abundant.  She would lift it up
at the nape of the neck, there in the bar,
and under the white, under the salt-and-
pepper, she'd show me her true color,
the color it was when she was a bride:
like her sex in the smoky light she would show me
the pure black.

Dorothy Dunnett

"Facts are the soil from which the story grows.  Imagination is a last resort."

Dorothy Dunnett

Scottish Novelist, Portrait Painter

1923 - 2001

A story should be rooted in reality.  The reader needs to be able to relate the characters to the world that he knows.  Consider the novel, Watership Down, by Richard Adams.  The story is about rabbits and yet, we identify with them because of their human characteristics.  Dorothy Dunnett was a writer of historical novels who did immense research to place her stories in historical reality.  But facts are never enough.  It is in the imagination that the story takes wings and flies far from the facts to spin a story that touches the minds and hearts of the readers.

Have you rooted your stories in the reality?  Have you used your imagination to carry the stories to the heavens?  How about your paintings?  Is there something in the work with which we can identify?  Does the painting carry us beyond the facts into another world?

Frida Kahlo

"I paint my own reality.  The only thing I know is that I paint because I need to, and I paint whatever passes through my head without any other consideration."

— Frida Kahlo

Mexican Painter

1907 - 1954

Do you paint the world as you see it or do you paint the world as it really is?  Can we as artists and writers know the world as it really is?  Or do we only experience a version of the world?  Only what our eyes, ears and nose tell us is out there.  Is the world we experience internal or external?  Is the world we remember internal or external?  

Roots (1943)
Sold for $5.6 million (2006)

Do you paint whatever passes through your mind?  Or do you censure what you paint because you think others won't like it or won't appreciate it or won't buy it?  Our minds often serve as judges who tell us what we should or shouldn't paint.  Our minds often limit us and hold us back from producing the art we want to produce.  Frida Kahlo was not that type of artist.  She painted the pain she felt.  She did not limit her art because she felt others wouldn't like it or understand it.  She painted the world as she saw it.  

Here is the movie trailer for the great movie of Frida Kahlo starring Salma Hayek.  If you have not seen this movie, you need to see it today.

Rico Lebrun

"True lines do not exist in nature; we invent them.  They are poetic fiction."  

— Rico Lebrun

Italian Artist

1900 - 1964

Turtle

All creative works of art are fiction.  They do not exist in reality.  Even the most realistic painting or novel have no existence in reality.  They approximate reality.  A painting of a rose is never going to match the real rose in the garden.  Human creativity does have limits.  We can not create the world in which we live.  And this is okay.  We are not gods.  We are not perfect.  Sometimes it is best to accept our limitations than to become frustrated in our attempts to overcome our limitations.

Pierre Auguste Renoir

Self-Portrait, 1910

"There are some things in painting which cannot be explained, and that something is essential."

Pierre Auguste Renoir

French Artist

1841 - 1919

On the Terrace, 1881

All art (painting, sculpture, literature, music, etc) has something that cannot be explained, identified or understood.  A work of art is greater than its creator.  A work of art is greater than the sum of its parts.  When you look at a painting what do you see?  What do you not see?  What is the soul of the painting?  When you read a story what do you feel?  What do you not feel?  What is the heart of the story?  When you listen to music what do you hear?  What do you not hear?  What is the spirit of the music?

When I write a poem, I don't always understand it and others may understand it even less.  The poem has a life of its own — a meaning of its own.  I will come upon it weeks, months and even years later and it has been transformed into something I do not know.  Some days I like it and some I don't, but it is beyond my control.  It laughs at me and demands that I leave it alone.  It never thanks me for bringing it into existence.  It accuses me of locking it in a closet.  It says I was a terrible parent.

Diego Rivera

"Only the work of art itself can raise the standard of taste."

— Diego Rivera

Mexican Artist/Muralist

1886 - 1957

People talk of taste as if it was real.  It is an illusion of judgement.  Every work of art, every poem, and every story has value.  When people begin to label art as good or bad, they are creating false categories that are based on artificial judgements.  What the majority label as good today may be considered bad tomorrow.  You may like something or not like something which in itself is okay.  Liking or disliking reveals something about you.  There is nothing inherently bad or good within the work of art itself.  The sense of good or bad is in the eyes of the beholder.  Any judgement made about a work of art is actually a judgement of the person who made the statement.

While there may only be one person today who likes your art, it does not make the art bad.  Two hundred years from now the majority of people may consider it a masterpiece.  Taste is fickle and useless.

The Flower Carrier

Diego Rivera, the great Mexican Muralist,  painted a number of murals in the United States during the 1930's.  Edsel Ford hired him to paint a mural at the Detroit Institute of Arts which is still on view today.  John Rockefeller commissioned him to paint a mural in New York.  Since Rivera was a communist, he included a portrait of Lenin in the mural.  When Rockefeller demanded that he remove the portrait from the mural, Rivera refused.  Rockefeller had the mural destroyed.  In the 1930's, a portrait of Lenin was unacceptable to the American public taste.  A work of art was destroyed because the subject matter was unacceptable.  Three hundred years from now, most people probably will never had heard of Lenin and nobody will be offended.  Remember public taste is fickle and arbitrary.

Alexander Calder

"The universe is real but you can't see it.  You have to imagine it.  Once you imagine it, you can be realistic about reproducing it."

— Alexander Calder

American Sculptor

1898 - 1976

Untitled, 1968
Centro Cultural de Belem
Lisbon, Portugal

Art and literature are created at the point where the universe meets the imagination.  The way we know the external world is through our senses.  Our minds interpret what they see, feel, hear, smell and taste and create the world we imagine to be there.  Even the most realistic painter or novelist interprets the world he sees with his imagination.  Even the most imaginative artist finds the beginning of his creation in the universe.

What is the universe that you see in your mind's eye?  What fantasies do you imagine to be real in your mind?  Art is always an interpretation of the world.  It is never the world.  It is never reality.  It is a pretend world that we believe to be true.

Pablo Picasso

"Art is the lie that reveals the truth."

— Pablo Picasso

Spanish Artist

1881 - 1973

When we stop and think about it, we realize that art is not real.  It is an attempt to create  reality, but it will never be reality.  As Picasso says, it is a lie.  Whether you are a writer or a painter, the world you are creating in your stories and pictures is not real.  But this lie can reveal the truth of the world that cannot be perceived in reality.  Now there is the paradox:  the lie reveals the truth.  

The question you must ask yourself:  Does my art reveal the truth?  Or is it only an illusion?  Only a lie?  Art that does not reveal the truth remains a lie.  What is the truth in your writing?  In your painting?  What insight do you have into life and living?

Here is one of my favorite Picasso paintings.  I have written a poem, Sing A Sad Song, about the painting and the truth that it reveals.

The Old Guitarist, 1903, Oil on Panel, 122.9 X 82.6 cm. Pablo Picasso, Spanish (1881 - 1973), The Art Institute of Chicago, Helen Birch Bartlett Memorial Collection, 1926.253.